The fractal geometry of Luhmann's sociological theory or debugging systems theory

Social theory faces new challenges as society changes. The question is not only if social theory can keep up with –and account for– social transformations, but also if it can avail of social changes (in this case, the current dominance of digital media) in order to reinvent itself. The most attracting features of modern digital resources, such as Big Data, lies on their tools of analysis. But it just might be that the most promising contribution to social theory resides in the epistemological foundations backing these developments and the conceptual tools they can offer to rephrase epistemological issues. In this sense, the function debuggers play with regard to their target programs could shed new light not only on the process of knowledge formation, but also on the process of theory-improvement/ updating. The present contribution intends to show how theory-debugging might work, by taking the sociology of Niklas Luhmann as a target program to be debugged by fractal geometry with the goal of delivering an enhanced version of system theory. It concludes by arguing for the plausibility of describing communication as a natural fractal susceptible of being modelled by some kind of fractal set, and for how communication media are responsible for the fractal structure of communication along sociocultural evolution. [Display omitted] •Computer science could teach social sciences how to (re)think of theory-design.•A debugger is a mean for theoretical recursiveness, helping theories to correct themselves.•The communication triad of Luhmann can easily be paralleled to a three-dimensional dynamical system.•Communication processes begin by being very informative and end when they cease to be informative.•Medial couplings hint at the interactive and interdependent character of media evolution.